Pier Angeli was an Italian-born television and film actress. Her American cinematographic debut was in the starring role of the 1951 film Teresa, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Young Star of the Year - Actress.
Background
Pier Angeli was born on June 19, 1932 in Cagliari, Sardegna, Italy, the daughter of Luigi Pierangeli, a construction engineer, and Enrichetta Romiti. She had a twin sister, who also became an actress.
When she was three, her family moved to Rome. They lived a prosperous life there, and Anna Maria was remembered for her devotion to animals and her indifference to school. Although the family suffered tremendous hardships during World War II, Anna Maria continued to go to school.
Education
She attended a local school in Cagliari; afterward, she attended art school in Rome.
Career
Her acting debut arose from meeting the French director Leonide Moguy at a party. He was trying to cast the lead actress role for a film called Domani e Troppo Tardi (released in America in 1952 as Tomorrow Is Too Late). The eighteen-year-old Anna Maria was by then a wide-eyed beauty with an ethereal demeanor, and although she had never taken acting lessons, Moguy thought she would be perfect for the role of Mirella, a naïve teenager who is destroyed by wrongful sexual allegations. She was an overnight success, winning the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. Angeli also attracted the attention of Stewart Stern from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who had co-written a script for Teresa (1951), the story of an Italian girl who marries an American soldier, then has to deal with living in the U. S. with a husband who is a mother-dominated weakling, rather than the hero she had imagined. She won the title role, even though she knew only a few words of English at the time. For this and later films in America, her name was changed to Pier Angeli. The film was a success, and Angeli garnered particularly good notices when the film was released: critics compared her to a young Greta Garbo. Along with her mother and her twin sister Marissa, also an actress, Angeli moved to Hollywood. Her father had died in 1950, just before her acting career started. Part of her success in Teresa was because she was very much like the immature character that she played. During the filming, she was extremely reluctant to play scenes in which she hugged or kissed John Ericson, her on-screen husband. Her room was filled with dozens of stuffed animals. This childlike quality actually endeared her to her fellow actors, and the Italian director Vittorio de Sica, who acted with her in Teresa, praised her for her purity of soul. She was also effective in her second American film, The Light Touch (1951), as an innocent girl who reforms a jewel thief played by Stewart Granger. Her star was already beginning to dim somewhat, though, by the time her third film, The Devil Makes Three, was released in 1952. She played an embittered German B-girl opposite Gene Kelly, but she was losing both momentum and her reputation as an up-and-coming star. During the next few years, Angeli's career was noted for good roles that got away and bad roles that did not. She had been announced to make Romeo and Juliet with Marlon Brando, but the movie fell through when there was a British-Italian production of the same play. She lost the ingénue role in The Rose Tattoo (1955) to her sister. During the filming of Story of Three Loves (1953), she broke her wrist doing her own stunts on a trapeze. This delayed production, forcing the studio to substitute Kirk Douglas for Ricardo Montalban. Sombrero (1953) and The Flame and the Flesh (1954), with Lana Turner, brought her stock even lower. She was loaned to Columbia for the 1955 release Port Afrique, a melodrama in which she played a Spanish café singer. Angeli's mother kept such a tight control over her daughters that the actress was not allowed to go out on an unchaperoned date until she had been in Hollywood for two years. In 1954, Angeli met James Dean, who was scheduled to star with her in the film Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). The two had an intense romance that was well hidden from the press. She broke off with Dean, probably yielding to parental pressure, and married singer Vic Damone later that year; they had one son and were divorced only four years later. Angeli retained her role in Somebody Up There Likes Me, ultimately released in 1956. After James Dean's sudden death, Paul Newman was brought in to play the part of boxer Rocky Graziano. Angeli turned in a sensitive performance as his wife. It was to be the only film that would live up to the promise that she showed in Teresa. The film was a critical and financial success. Angeli finished her MGM contract with The Vintage (1957), in which she starred with Mel Ferrer, and Merry Andrew (1958), in which she teamed with Danny Kaye. This would also be the substantial end to her career in Hollywood. In 1958 her divorce from Vic Damone put her in the headlines. This included a bitter child custody dispute. She was granted full custody in 1960, but Damone kept the case alive, claiming that the boy was not being raised as an American. In 1965, the order was modified to joint custody that still allowed the child to go to school in Rome. Afterward, she resumed acting in England, but this move did not turn her career around. In 1962 she married Italian bandleader Armando Trovajoli. This union produced another son, and by 1966 a second divorce and another child custody battle, which she lost. By this time, she was continuing her film career in Europe, playing roles in low-budget films with "international casts" that often included American leading men whose Hollywood careers had dried up. She reverted to her original name. Although she did get a small but effective part in The Battle of the Bulge (1965), most of the 1960's saw her working in everything from low-budget spy films to sexploitation films such as Love Me, Love My Wife (1970), which included her in protracted nude scenes. Few of her films from this period were ever shown in the United States. By 1971, she was back in Hollywood, trying for a career rebirth. She did get a role in a minor film, Octaman (1972), but there seemed little chance that she could ever recapture her past glory. She died of a barbiturate overdose on Sept. 10, 1971. One newspaper reported that she was about to be offered a starring role in an episode of the television series "Bonanza" at the time of her death.
Connections
Angeli also attracted the attention of Stewart Stern from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who had co-written a script for Teresa (1951), the story of an Italian girl who marries an American soldier, then has to deal with living in the U. S. with a husband who is a mother-dominated weakling, rather than the hero she had imagined.
Along with her mother and her twin sister Marissa, also an actress, Angeli moved to Hollywood.
Her father had died in 1950, just before her acting career started.
Angeli's mother kept such a tight control over her daughters that the actress was not allowed to go out on an unchaperoned date until she had been in Hollywood for two years.
Angeli turned in a sensitive performance as his wife.
This included a bitter child custody dispute.
divorced:
Dean
She broke off with Dean, probably yielding to parental pressure, and married singer Vic Damone later that year; they had one son and were divorced only four years later.
married:
Dean
She broke off with Dean, probably yielding to parental pressure, and married singer Vic Damone later that year; they had one son and were divorced only four years later.
married:
Armando
In 1962 she married Italian bandleader Armando Trovajoli.
husband:
John
During the filming, she was extremely reluctant to play scenes in which she hugged or kissed John Ericson, her on-screen husband.
